Lecture broadcasting or webcasting systems have become more prevalent in recent years. With more frequent academic and technical exchanges, thousands of lectures and training sessions are held in universities, conferences, or even corporations and, as a result, live broadcasting of lectures in these places is becoming more and more attractive. However, the cost of live lecture broadcasting has been prohibitive. The costs include the hardware cost and recurring labor cost of service providers, lecture hosts, and speakers. A complete end-to-end solution that can effectively reduce the cost is highly demanded.
Existing systems have been used, however, these systems have demonstrated various shortcomings. For instance, the video/audio delivery is not scalable due to the performance bottleneck of the streaming server. In addition, presentation materials need to be edited manually to synchronize with video/audio content. As a result, a separate plug-in may have to be installed in the presentation PC, which means the presentation PC must be managed by a service provider. To control the process of scheduling, capturing and broadcasting, a console may run on a control machine, which also has to be operated by a service provider. Finally, the schedule can only be published on the web page meaning it cannot be updated to end users effectively.